El Tigre falls, the enigmatic narco from Madrid who lived in luxury in Dubai

On November 11, 2020, the

, a container ship almost 300 meters long and flying the Hong Kong flag, arrived at the port of Algeciras (Cádiz) from Paraguay.

His mooring was expected by the Civil Guard, which had been investigating for some time, in what he had dubbed Operation Watchtower, a criminal plot that was trying to introduce an important drug cache into Spain.

The agents were not wrong.

In a container that officially contained charcoal, the agents found 63 burlap sacks that concealed 1,882 kilos of high-purity cocaine, with an estimated value on the black market of 67.8 million euros.

That day not only did close to two tons of drugs fall and a dozen people were arrested, but the beginning of the end of El Tigre began to take shape,

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Today, two years after that arrest, El Tigre finally has a name.

It is allegedly Alejandro Salgado Vega, a 44-year-old from Madrid who in 2014 was accused of forgery and criminal organization and who, since then, had not been implicated in criminal activities in Spain.

Salgado was arrested at the end of August in Dubai, the city-emirate of the Persian Gulf that, with its 3.4 million inhabitants and extremely high standard of living, has become a sanctuary for big drug lords in the last five years. but also for money launderers, cybercriminals and fugitives of all kinds.

The arrest occurred for a minor act, but punishable in the emirate: drug use.

Now, after the investigation of the Civil Guard,

The Civil Guard points out that he and his organization - of which seven members have been arrested in recent weeks in Spain - have "a presence on five continents" and that it was Salgado who was in charge of controlling "detailed drug consignments from its origin in South America, mainly, until its recovery in ports all over the world”.

The arrest of El Tigre is added to those of six other

also recently carried out in Dubai, among which are two other large drug traffickers claimed by the Spanish justice system, in an international police macro-raid in which the Central Operational Unit participated (UCO) with Operation Faukas.

In the two years that have elapsed since the location of the cocaine in the port of Algeciras, El Tigre has been an enigma, as well as "a coveted figure", according to the Civil Guard in its note.

Faceless and nameless, the investigators heard in the recorded conversations the alleged members of the criminal network speak of him only by his alias.

From those conversations intervened by court order, the relevance of him was deduced, detail sources close to the investigation.

His subordinates commented that it was he who had ordered the collaborators to pay “with 500 [euro] bills”, the one who demanded to check “if the

[merchandise, supposedly referring to drugs] is coming”, or the one who ordered to inquire about certain people who participated because "they don't trust".

A relevance that grew exponentially when the Civil Guard was able to analyze the messages exchanged in the encrypted chats of the Sky ECC telephone application, supposedly used by organized crime mafias around the world to communicate without their conversations being intercepted by the policeman.

Among the 900 million messages recently unraveled by experts from France, Belgium and the Netherlands, several appeared that the Civil Guard attributed to El Tigre, who identified himself in the chat with a numerical code that, although it did not allow us to know who he was, did revealed his alleged involvement in several drug shipments to Spain and that he was hiding in Dubai.

The Civil Guard then began negotiations with the Dubai police to identify him and find his whereabouts.

The Spanish agents then warned their colleagues from the emirate of the "potential and dangerousness of this person and his organization."

In Dubai, the alleged narco from Madrid "led a life of a very high level, going unnoticed among the rest of the population, with exemplary behavior, not having any type of incident that could alert the local police forces", highlights the armed institute .

However, a chance event caused his screen to collapse like a house of cards.

A local police raid on a party led to the arrest of several of the party's participants for drug use.

In the emirate, a recent law punishes anyone who induces, incites or facilitates consumption by another person with up to five years in prison.

Among the detainees was El Tigre, so after identifying him, the Dubai authorities informed the Civil Guard.

An international arrest warrant issued by the Investigating Court 1 of Algeciras, which is investigating the cache discovered in the port of the Cadiz town in November 2020, already weighed on him. Now an extradition order has been processed for these facts, although the Investigators seek to link it to other caches,

Material intervened in Operation Watchtower of the Civil Guard to members of the El Tigre organization.

Shortly after Salgado's arrest, the Civil Guard was carrying out the third phase of Operation Watchtower, which ended with the seven arrests in November.

Among them is a port worker from Ceuta, whom the investigators place at the top of the plot.

A consignee from the port of Valencia who, supposedly, was in charge of discharging the legal shipments where the cocaine was hidden to give the entire operation a legal appearance, as well as a businessman from Cuenca responsible for renting ships to hide the drug until its distribution, and a person in Toledo who was in charge of making cash payments to collaborators.

The operation has not yet concluded and the court has issued two international arrest warrants, in addition to the one for El Tigre.

One, against Ruben PG, alias

, Salgado's alleged lieutenant.

The other, against the alleged financier of part of the shipment of cocaine from Algeciras.

Like the Madrid narco, the latter was also known within the organization with an animal alias, although in his most tender case: El Osito.